Collaborations, Grants & Contract Research

Gene Check Awarded Three-Year $1.7M Grant for High-Throughput, Low-Cost SNP Genotyping for Diagnostics and Genome Scanning

October 1, 2003 – Fort Collins, CO – Gene Check, Inc., a private biotech DNA research and veterinary diagnostics laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado, announced today that it has been awarded a three-year grant worth nearly $2M from the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Dr. Robert E. Wagner, President and CEO of Gene Check, stated that the grant was awarded by NIST's Advanced Technology Program in order to "develop a method for the accurate and simultaneous detection of up to 100,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or point mutations, in patient DNA, thereby enabling rapid, low-cost genotyping for disease diagnosis, susceptibility testing, and personalized medicine."

In reference to the ATP award Dr. Wagner commented, "This grant validates Gene Check's scientific research capabilities." Wagner added that, "Someday, when you visit the doctor's office to have determined, from a single drop of blood, your genetic predisposition for any one of many different medical conditions ranging from heart disease to various cancers, as well as to have determined the absolutely best medicines for specifically treating a patient of your genetic make-up, you may have Gene Check to thank." In addition to a full complement of research competencies, Gene Check has several patents pending.

According to NIST's project brief, the explosion of genetic information arising from the sequencing of the human genome provides unparalleled opportunities for advances in medical care. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)--mutations affecting the pair of molecules forming a single "rung: of the double-helix DNA "ladder"--account for the vast majority of the 10 million sequence differences between any two humans. The ability to detect and genotype these SNPs may allow the mapping of disease genes, diagnosis of diseases, determination of predispositions to disease, and prediction of drug effects.

In this three-year project, Gene Check will develop a rapid, low-cost method for accurately detecting and genotyping up to 100,000 SNPs in a single DNA sample. The objective of this three-year project is to develop a SNP detection method that genotypes more than 20 SNPs per second in a fully automated system at a cost of less than $0.02 per SNP. A set of 100,000 SNPs could then be completely genotyped for less than $2,000 in less than three hours using off-the-shelf-instrumentation.

If successful, this innovative method would bring immediate improvements to genomics, diagnostics, and health care. High-throughput, low-cost genotyping would hasten the mapping of genes associated with disease susceptibility along with predictive toxicities and efficacies of particular drugs in patients (pharmacogenomics). DNA analysis could be accomplished in hours, and affordable genetic profiling of patients could reduce hospitalization costs from adverse drug reactions by $1-4 billion. Furthermore, this new method would advance the discovery of highly effective gene therapies.